Daphne Bramham: If it’s 876, that’s Jamaica calling

And you’d best not answer

In 2012, an estimated 2,815 Canadians were swindled out of more than $2 million. Americans reported losses of more than $300 million to scammers in 2009.

Photograph by: Mario Beauregard
, Fotolia.com

Every 90 seconds or so for the past eight months, one of Jean Olson’s two phones would ring.

It started at 5 a.m. and continued all day, every day until well into the evening.

Whether on her cellphone or her North Vancouver home’s landline, the area code that almost invariably showed up on the call display was 876.

It was Jamaica calling. Scammers, that is.

“They sound like good people. They have soft voices; soothing, soft voices.”

Since the first call, Olson has sent more than $10,000 to Jamaica through Western Union and Moneygram on the promise of receiving everything from a lottery win of $25 million to a new car.

With every call, the men with the sunshine-y voices told Olson, she would get the prize once she paid a tax or delivery fee or some other charge — $300 or $250 or $400.

In desperation and frustration, Olson’s family physically cut the phone line to the house and got rid of the cellphone a few days ago.

On Tuesday night, a pizza was delivered to her home with a message: “Call Jim, it’s urgent.”

Attached was a phone number with an 876 area code.

And, by the way, Olson was stuck with the bill for the pizza.

Until the phone line was cut, nothing slowed the frequency of the calls — not even last week’s two-day raid by a Jamaican-American joint police taskforce that resulted in the arrests of 41 people, or an April raid when 20 people were arrested.

There’s too much money up for grabs.

If anything, the raids added urgency to the callers’ pleas. Last week, the callers told Olson that Jim Shoebuck was in jail. He was the first to contact her nearly a year ago.

“He told me I’d won a bunch of money. So I listened, which was stupid,” the 85-year-old Olson told me recently as the cellphone vibrated beside her. “But I thought, why not? I’ll talk to him. So I did.”

She has wired money to Shoebuck, and men named Rayon Grey and Trevor Leach, who got most of it. When her family convinced her not to send more money, the callers swore at her and threatened to kill her.

“These people are bullies. They’re very insistent, and I’ve just been very stupid about the whole thing. ... It’s been a disaster.”

Several months ago, a John Goodman called, saying that he was in jail in Las Vegas serving a five-year term for fraud.

He apologized for having defrauded Olson, told her he had ratted out the Jamaicans. Now one of them was threatening to kill his children unless he came up with three payments of $980.

Olson sent the money.

“I can’t really remember all the details of any of this. They’ve got my mind,” she says, wearily. “But usually it’s $200 or $300. Why (do I do it)? God knows.”

Jean and Adolph, a retired CP systems planner, have had a comfortable life. They met and married in Manitoba, lived in a couple of different cities before settling here to raise their four children.

The calls began last fall soon after their 58-year-old son died suddenly. It hit hard, especially for Jean who was already mourning the recent deaths of her brother, sister and closest friend.

“I was vulnerable,” she says, head in hands, tears trailing down her cheeks. “I can’t even talk about it any more. I just can’t cope.”

Short of cutting off the phones completely, changing numbers is the only way to stop this ugly, lucrative business. But after her daughter, Lauren Ollsin, did that, Jean changed them back. Already lonely, Jean wanted to make sure her friends could still find her.

Police believe as few as 10 per cent of the victims of these scams ever come forward to the police. They can barely admit to themselves that they’ve been taken. They don’t want people to think they’re stupid.

In 2012, an estimated 2,815 Canadians were swindled out of more than $2 million. Americans reported losses of more than $300 million to scammers in 2009. That’s the year the joint task force was formed.

The Jamaican scammers are relatively recent here. A few years ago, it was Nigerians. And then there are the homegrown cons, whose most recent scam targeted not only innocents, but the RCMP.

Claiming to be RCMP officers, scammers said they had affidavits proving the person owed thousands of dollars in back taxes. To avoid legal costs, the person must immediately transfer all available money to “the police”.

“If I had a magic wand, I’d lock all the scammers up,” says North Vancouver RCMP Cpl. Richard De Jong. “These people have no heart and no soul.”

But there is no magic wand. International investigations gobble huge amounts of limited resources. Besides, whether they were gullible, naïve or even greedy, the victims all initially willingly parted with their money.

Maybe because they are lonely or are just more trusting, the elderly are most frequently targeted. That suggests Canada with its great bulge of Baby Boomers could be a scammers’ bonanza in the coming decades.

“Don’t ever talk to the scammers,” says De Jong. “Hang up. Even five seconds is too long because they have a hotlist and they’ll just keep trying.”

Yet, if police can do little, the Canada Anti-Fraud Centre seems capable of even less.

Calls to its toll-free line were met with a curt recorded message that said the lines were busy, call back later. Click. Replies to emails advised calling the phone line.

Jean Olson has plenty of company in her misery. But she finds no comfort in that.

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